19 Facts About Sonia Greene

Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft Davis was an American one-time pulp fiction writer and amateur publisher, businesswoman and milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century.

Sonia Greene was a president of the United Amateur Press Association.

Sonia Greene's father apparently died when she was a child in 1888, and her mother emigrated to the United States, leaving Sonia and her brother in Liverpool at the Baron Maurice de Hirsch School.

At the age of sixteen, on December 24,1899, Sonia married Samuel Greene, a Russian whose name may have originally been Samuel Seckendorff, who was ten years her senior.

Sonia Greene's daughter, Florence Carol was born on March 19,1903.

The marriage was turbulent, and Samuel Sonia Greene died in 1916, apparently by his own hand.

Sonia Greene was independently middle class, unusual for women of that time.

Sonia Greene worked as a milliner at a department store and traveled frequently for her job.

Sonia Greene's salary enabled her to rent a house for herself and her daughter in Flatbush, Brooklyn, which at the time was an affluent suburb.

Sonia Greene donated money to several amateur press publications, and traveled to amateur press conventions.

Sonia Greene had been introduced to the world of amateur journalism four years earlier by Lovecraft's colleague James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Lovecraft completed his story "Under the Pyramids" in February 1924, but lost his typescript of the story at Union Station in Providence, Rhode Island when he was on his way to New York to marry Sonia Greene, who helped him for most of their honeymoon in Philadelphia retyping the manuscript.

Sonia Greene lost her hat shop and suffered poor health conditions.

Meanwhile Sonia Greene lived on the road, traveling for her job.

Sonia Greene sent Lovecraft a weekly allowance that helped him pay for a tiny apartment in the then-working class Brooklyn Heights.

Sonia Greene slept there one or two days out of the month.

Sonia Greene was unaware of Lovecraft's passing until 1945, eight years after his death.

Sonia Greene was informed of this late in life and it disturbed her considerably.

Sonia Greene later resided at Diana Lynn Lodge, a home for the elderly which is still in operation in Sunland-Tujunga, Los Angeles, and died there on December 26,1972, at age 89.